Customer orientation: Are you still wasting your time?

Post date: 10-Jan-2015 01:02:35

by Alex Chadyuk

Although it may sound shocking to most sales managers, it has been established for quite some time that customer orientation in selling, although it feels right for the salesperson in question, does not improve sales performance (see, for example, a meta-analysis of Franke & Park, 2006). Customer orientation is usually associated with problem – solution selling approaches, low pressure in selling encounters, and high concern for the customer. However, it has been argued that too much time may be spent looking for customer’s problems to solve, which inevitably results in delayed sales and lower margins. (A personal reminiscence from my days in Unisys in the early 90s: we decided to start the sale of a banking system from a consulting assignment intended to assess the status of the bank in order to develop an optimal solution. In the mean time, Midas swooped in and sold their system, pretty much “as is”, behind our back.)

Unlike ‘customer orientation’, the methodology of ‘adaptive selling’ stresses gathering of information about the prospect before and during the sales call in order to customize format and content of the selling message, while keeping the fundamentals of the sales proposition intact. Recent research by Roman and Martin (2014) showed that not only adaptive selling is superior in return on sales time invested, it results in higher customer satisfaction and loyalty in complex business-to-business selling scenarios.

References

Franke, G. R., & Park, J.-E. (2006). Salesperson adaptive selling behavior and customer orientation: A meta-analysis. Journal of Marketing Research, XLIII, 693-702.

Roman, S., & Martin, P. J. (2014). Does the hierarchical position of the buyer make a difference? The influence of perceived adaptive selling on customer satisfaction and loyalty in a business-to-business context. Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing, 29, 364 – 373.